Posted again for article on common speech 12.13.13;
I thought this my best example. I also wrote Self Portrait at Sevenwhich I posted for #OLN Tuesday as an effort to achieve this voice of mine.
I wrote another for today, but as poems often do it resisted my attempt
to do what I needed it to.

50 thoughts on “Communion”

Most vivid image here, Gay, for me is the blue back suit, and the waterfoul, which is so expressive of the birdbath communion cacklng away as the humans find their own peace in an everyday moment masked in that substitute chatter. Very creative use of repetition, words(water) combined with others, subtly changing (bowl, foul) and that line “the wind walks through the trees and branches roll” is just exquisite.But this is a beautiful poem that deserves better than to be picked at and analyzed–it should be read and savored and lived with instead. Thanks for sharing it.

I’ve been studying, listening, of late. This poem fit right into an exercise I’ve been practicing.
I loved this poem. The action/scene/sounds outside speak symbolically for the couple, or memory, of the couple, inside. More people should be silent and allow nature to speak, but I doubt that was your theme.
I loved the rhymes, aliterations, and the repetitions of certain key words.
My only critique, which is very minor, and only a critique if you read the poem literally is the semi-close to POV shift from the first and second stanzas to the third. And wondering why you were speaking for “we” in the third stanza. BUT, if the MC is alone at the suppertable, and the birds outside are echoing or triggering memories of a lost or missing love, then bravo, you nailed it. At any rate, even if I am waaaay off base, this is a top notch poem I am proud to be associated with in a being in the group kind of way. Most excellent. I enjoyed the tenderness in which it flowed as I read. Very, very good!

Oh Henry, I think you may have thought about this a bit more than I did. Maybe it was subconscious at that. My friend, housemate, and partner is rather far inside himself these days and I often feel I am alone. I think I probably should have said “we” but as I own the house, I do sort of think of it as mine. Hmmm.??

A tender and searching write that left me feeling intensely the inner dialogue (even unwritten). I didn’t notice the repetitions which I attribute to your skilled crafting. I agree with Joy, a poem to be savored and experienced in the true sense. Like those moments in life where we are truly present, a sort of miraculous piece really.

Yes, I felt quite tender. Yesterday was a good day in terms of getting Ron to eat, and fortunately he woke up hungry for the first time in months. I made french toast and eggs for him and he got down all but one bit in addition to a milk drink made with ensure a fortified drink. He has to take in at least 3K calories a day in order to heal and really at this point survive. We’re standing on a brink here and I have felt helpless. Day before yesterday, decided to “take the bull by the horns” as we Texans say. No more letting him decide. I started making decisions for him. He is quite simply too weak to think straight.

A beautiful capture of life inside and out.
Loved saying the first line out loud…
On my porch in blueblack suit a grackle walks
By waterbowl…
the last line made me ache…
through the silence we talk with words and soul

Gay, my friend, this has both a wonderful flow and a lot of soul, not just in the final line. I don’t know if you used “casserole” simply for the rhyme, but it does much more than that, invoking warmth, delicious smells, fullness and love. Wonderful stuff.

My mother used to mistakenly call grackles starlings, so until I was an adult I did too. Now I know they are grackles and starlings are those smaller, even plainer scavengers. Grackles do have that blueish accent, though, and I rather like them. The repetition here puts me in mind of exactly how birds walk, tilt their heads, and circle around a thing before alighting.

I wrote this rather quickly after reading Joy’s article. I am considering Chinese Love Poems for next Form and had been reading some. Looked out the window and came up with this. I was making a casserole. Trying hard to compress as many calories in as small a volume as possible. Casserole was on my mind and I used it. It was very much an “in the minute” poem. Wonder if I should leave my in first stanza or change to “our”. Can’t decide. Hmm. Thank you for coming by and commenting. Love having you as a guest :-)

They are ubiquitous here and in our Live Oak tree outside the door. They’ll eat anything and steal anything too. They’re a little bit crow, and a little bit magpie I think. They have about a jillion different cries. It makes for interesting mornings when they’re most loquacious.

oy was reading your comments to catch up with where you are at…good job taking hte bull by the horns…i am sorry though that he is so weak….nice capture of the moment in verse gay…sorry i am so late…just getting home and playing a bit of catch up…the language just tends to roll like waves as i read this….

Gay, I love the scene you have set here. (I see that I had visited it once before.) I like the idea of grackles talking to waterfowl; but most of all I like the idea of having a conversation over a casserole. Thanks for hosting today.

I remember when I first moved to this little town — with its quaint New England downtown digs, created so to attract tourists bored of Disney — I heard about a poetry night at a bookstore there and went one early Saturday night. All the poets were much older, and one, looking like a retired English professor, read three poems about birds in his yard. How … quaint … I thought, wondering whether to read the poem about Moby Dick’s penis or the one about how my wife’s nephew died. But I was just a slow learner, and I love most poems that find the magnitude in the simplest intimacies, the rarest places for a roaming soul to linger. There really is nothing more than this communion of the sayable and unsaid.